Arsenal travel to Nottingham Forest under pressure to keep up with Manchester City, and Fulham have won under Álvaro Arbeloa. In Australia, James Marchesani has won the WA Open, Emma Finucane has collected a third medal in Shanghai and the top AFL draft prospects have picked their favourite for the first selection.
Arsenal visit Nottingham Forest as they try to keep pace with Manchester City
Arsenal, the reigning Premier League champions, play Nottingham Forest at the City Ground on Sunday, October 18, with kick-off at 4.30pm British time, knowing they cannot afford to drop points in the title race. Manchester City, coached by Enzo Maresca, lead the table and beat Ipswich Town on Saturday to extend their record start to the season, which means Arsenal could find themselves six points adrift by the time their match begins. The full picture of the title race remains uncertain until City’s appeal over 114 breaches of the league’s financial rules is decided. Arsenal start as favourites, but their record at Forest’s ground is modest: they have won only twice in their last seven visits, and their two most recent away games against Forest both ended goalless. The match is being shown on television in Britain and streamed in North America.
Forest have plenty of attacking quality. Morgan Gibbs-White leads the Premier League with seven big chances created this season and has three goals or assists in six league games, making the 26-year-old the player most likely to trouble Arsenal. Yet Forest have failed to score in any of their three home matches so far, and they now face the strongest defence in the division. The Arsenal defender William Saliba has returned to training after a long injury absence but is expected to miss the game. Arsenal have built much of their recent success on narrow victories, winning nine of their last 14 league matches by a single goal, although they have conceded first in three of their last four Premier League games and recovered to win two of them. Forest, coached by Oliver Glasner, are expected to threaten through quick counter-attacks and set pieces.
The City Ground stands in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, on the banks of the River Trent, and has been Nottingham Forest’s home since it opened in September 1898. It holds 31,212 spectators, and the club has plans to raise the capacity to 45,000 and eventually to 52,500. The record attendance of 49,946 was set for a match against Manchester United on October 28, 1967. The stadium was rebuilt in stages over the decades, with new stands added in 1957, 1965 and 1980 and further redevelopment between 1992 and 1996, and it was one of the venues when England hosted the European Championship in 1996. It lies only about 270 metres from Meadow Lane, the home of neighbouring Notts County, making the two grounds the closest pair of professional football stadiums in England. Since 2024 the ground has also hosted matches of Nottingham Forest Women.
Iwobi goal gives Arbeloa his first Premier League win as Fulham beat Hull
Fulham beat Hull City 1-0 at Craven Cottage on Saturday, giving their manager, Álvaro Arbeloa, a first Premier League victory at the seventh attempt and lifting the club off the bottom of the table after a week in which his future had been questioned. Alex Iwobi scored the only goal in the first half. After an attack down the right, the Hull wing-back Brooke Norton-Cuffy held off Josh King but failed to clear, Sander Berge steered the ball into Iwobi’s path and his first-time shot slipped under the diving goalkeeper Konstantinos Tzolakis at the near post. Fulham should have won more comfortably. Iwobi later wasted a clear chance with the goal at his mercy, King shot too close to Tzolakis, and Gonzalo García headed against the crossbar from close range. Fulham finished with 10 players after Ryan Sessegnon was sent off in stoppage time for a foul on Robinio Vaz.
Fulham had also led against Ipswich a week earlier and against Manchester United before the international break, only to drop points, and Arbeloa, a former Real Madrid manager, said he had seen this film before. He said he never felt his team were in danger, but that in football any side can score in a second, and that it was better to win 2-0 than 1-0 because it allowed a calmer finish. He added that he always tries to smile, even when his team is losing. Hull, who are without a win in five matches, offered little threat. Their head coach, Sergej Jakirovic, called it the worst performance since he took charge, saying Fulham won every challenge. Arbeloa was appointed in the summer to succeed Marco Silva, bringing five members of staff and three players from Real Madrid, with the aim of introducing a more entertaining style after four seasons of mid-table stability.
Craven Cottage, in Fulham in west London, has been the home of Fulham Football Club since 1896, apart from a spell away between 2002 and 2004. It sits beside Bishop’s Park on the banks of the River Thames and holds 28,107 spectators. The record attendance of 49,335 was set for a match against Millwall in 1938. The site’s history goes back more than 300 years: William Craven, sixth holder of the title Baron Craven, put up the first cottage in 1780 near where the Johnny Haynes Stand now stands, on land that was once woodland forming part of Anne Boleyn’s hunting grounds, and it was originally a royal hunting lodge. The stadium’s design is credited to the architect Archibald Leitch. The ground has also staged matches for national teams and was once the home of the rugby league club Fulham RLFC, which played there between 1980 and 1984.
James Marchesani wins the WA Open for his first PGA Tour of Australasia title
James Marchesani won the WA Open at Secret Harbour Golf Links on Sunday, claiming his first victory on the PGA Tour of Australasia with a final-round 65 and a total of 17 under par. The Victorian, who turns 36 next week and is the son of the former Fitzroy and Carlton footballer Frank Marchesani, finished one shot ahead of Jasper Stubbs, with the defending champion Oliver Bekker two shots back. The three had shared the overnight lead and together played their final rounds in a combined 18 under par. The lead changed hands several times. Stubbs briefly moved in front with an eagle on the 16th, before Marchesani holed a birdie putt from about three metres to draw level. The decisive moment came on the 17th, a 178-metre par three, where Marchesani hit his tee shot to within about 60 centimetres for a tap-in birdie. He then made par on the final hole.
Marchesani, who played college golf in the United States, had come close to a title many times. Last season he finished third on the tour’s order of merit without winning an event. He said that if anyone had told him he would shoot 65 to win, he would have thought they were crazy, adding that he was not even sure of his score because he had sort of blacked out. He said he had played very good golf for the past 18 months without quite getting over the line, and knew it would happen if he kept doing the same things. Describing the shot on the 17th, he said he had hit a similar one on Saturday and knew the slope would help, and that he and his caddie, Brady Watt, had picked a good line. Bekker, trying to become the first player in 43 years to retain the title, shot 67 but bogeyed the 14th and 15th holes.
The Western Australian Open, usually shortened to the WA Open, is part of the PGA Tour of Australasia schedule and dates back to 1913. It grew out of the Western Australian Amateur Championship, first held in 1911 with a stroke-play qualifying stage followed by match play. In 1913 the stroke-play stage was opened to professionals, creating the first Western Australian Open, which was played on the Fremantle links on August 28 with nearly 30 players taking part and was won by Clyde Pearce with rounds of 77 and 78. The tournament has been a tour event every year since 2009 except 2019. It is now played in October at Secret Harbour Golf Links, a par-72 course measuring 6,799 yards, for a prize fund of 200,000 Australian dollars. The tournament record for the lowest total is 260, set by Deyen Lawson in 2022, while Ryan Fox holds the record for the lowest score to par, at 23 under, set in 2014.
Emma Finucane takes keirin bronze to complete a medal set at the world championships
Emma Finucane won bronze in the keirin on Sunday at the Track Cycling World Championships in Shanghai, completing a set of three medals at the event but narrowly missing gold for the third time. The 23-year-old British rider led into the home straight before being overtaken on the line by Alina Lysenko, competing as a neutral athlete, and Lea Friedrich of Germany. She finished just 14 thousandths of a second behind the winner. Her bronze added to silver medals in the team sprint and the individual sprint, both of which were won by Chinese riders. In the team sprint, Rhianna Parris-Smith took the place of the recently retired Katy Marchant, and the British trio was beaten by the Chinese team of Jiang Yulu, Tong Mengqi and Yuan Liying. Great Britain finished top of the overall medal table with 12 medals, including three gold medals for Anna Morris.
Finucane said she would come back fighting for gold. She said she had never before won medals in all three of her events at a world championships, and that the confidence she had gained during the week would carry into the years ahead. She said she was frustrated not to be on the top step but proud of how she had ridden, having put herself in a winning position in every race, and that she was still learning with the Olympics as her main goal. Finucane was part of the British trio, with Marchant and Sophie Capewell, that won the women’s team sprint at the Paris Olympics in 2024, Britain’s first Olympic gold in that event, and she said retaining the title in Los Angeles in 2028 was the big aim. She said strong competition inside the British squad, with around ten riders at home fighting for places, would drive the team forward, and that world records kept falling.
Finucane was born in Carmarthen, Wales, on December 22, 2002, and competes in sprint events, the time trial and the keirin. She holds Olympic gold in the team sprint, has twice been crowned world and European sprint champion, and has also taken world and European titles as part of the team sprint squad. At the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris she won gold in the team sprint and bronze medals in both the individual sprint and the keirin, becoming the first British woman to win three medals at a single Olympics since Mary Rand in 1964. She first came to prominence in 2019, when she became junior European champion in the 500-metre time trial. Riding for Wales at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, she took a pair of bronze medals as a senior, in the sprint and the team sprint, and she has since added Commonwealth medals in Glasgow in 2026. She rides for Team Inspired.
AFL draft prospects name Dougie Cochrane as their choice for the first pick
Dougie Cochrane, a 196-centimetre prospect from Port Adelaide’s Next Generation Academy, has emerged as the favourite among his peers to be the first player chosen in this year’s Australian Football League draft. Asked which player they would take with the first pick, nine of 22 leading prospects named Cochrane. Port Adelaide are preparing to match a first-pick bid for him, which would make him the first player to attract such a bid since Jamarra Ugle-Hagan in 2020. Cochrane missed most of his draft year, including the national under-18 championships, after knee surgery in March to treat tendinitis, but earlier performances kept him in contention. He won the 2024 Kevin Sheehan Medal as the best player of the division one national under-16 championships and kicked four goals in the first half of his senior debut in the South Australian league last year. Prospects described him as an athletic freak and a generational talent.
The next most popular choice was Cody Walker, a prolific ball-winner eligible to join Carlton under the father-son rule, because his father, Andrew, played 202 games for the club. Walker has spent time in Carlton’s academy, its second-tier team and its senior training squad, and Cochrane himself said he would take Walker first, praising the way he bursts out of stoppages. Others who played alongside Walker in the national academy team praised his power and will to win. Walker said he would pick Ethan Drever, a powerful inside midfielder from the GWV Rebels. Cochrane, Walker and Drever are all seen as potential top-three selections, and Essendon are increasingly linked with Drever if they use the first pick. Draft position does not always predict a career, as the Brownlow Medal winner Nick Daicos went at pick four, but several former first picks, including Luke Hodge and Marc Murphy, went on to play at least 250 games.
The draft is the annual system through which clubs in the Australian Football League, the top level of Australian rules football, select unsigned players. Its first form appeared in 1981, when the competition was still the Victorian Football League and each team was given two selections of interstate players, in reverse order of the previous season’s finishing positions. The league introduced it to even out the competition, in response to rising transfer fees and player salaries combined with falling attendances, which threatened its future. It also followed the failure of country zoning, introduced in 1967, which had let clubs with the strongest recruiting zones, such as Carlton and Hawthorn, dominate those with weaker ones, such as Melbourne. The first modern draft was held in 1986 alongside the existing zones. Since then, rules on priority picks, zone allocations, the father-son rule and separate mid-season, pre-season and rookie drafts have changed many times.